The Queen's Cipher (12 page)

“Okay, so what?”  

There was such a thing, she said, as a reverse cipher in which you counted backwards so that A was 24 and Z 1.

F(19)+B(23)+A(24)+C(22)+O(11)+N(12)=111

“Satisfied?” she queried. “The Seventy-Second Inquisition picks out ‘F Bacon’ by both simple and reverse count and, to cap it all, 72 and 39 add up to 111. It’s mathematically perfect.”

He bowed his head in silent homage. But it wasn’t going to come from the senior librarian who had entered the room with a stern look on her face. Sam noticed the bulging belly, the frizzy hair and the grey roots at the scalp.

“I’m sorry, but if you can’t keep quiet I will have to ask you to leave.”

Freddie gave her a rueful grin. “Heartfelt apologies, Petronella, we’re going anyway.”

The librarian’s pale face lit up. “Oh, it’s you Dr Brett. I didn’t see you come in.”

“Well, we’ll be off before we cause any more trouble, but do give me a ring sometime. I’d love to see your paper on Shakespeare’s will.”

The sun was shining as they left the library. Sam dug him in the ribs. “She was flirting with you, Freddie. Sucking in her stomach and sticking out her lips. You must have noticed.”

He hadn’t. He only had eyes for her. The way her skirt swished around her shapely legs.

“The high placed Mason you talked about wouldn’t be Milton Cleaver by any chance?”

Sam’s eyes narrowed and a vein began to throb in her neck. “What if it was?” she said defensively. “It’s not my fault you hate the man.”

He could feel the anger rising inside of him. “If this Masonic lore is supposed to be a secret what’s he telling you for. I’m wondering how close you are to him.”

“Don’t tell me you’re jealous. There’s absolutely no reason for that.”

“No, it’s not envy. I’m just curious, that’s all.”

Of course he was jealous. It was eating away at him like iron corroded by rust. The thought of Cleaver touching her made him feel sick.

“That makes two of us,” she replied, without breaking her stride. “But what I am curious about is the role played by the Abbot of Sponheim.”

Freddie came to a halt. “Who was he?”

“I am talking about Johannes Trithemius, the cryptographic genius who fashioned these secret codes. Since our trip to Sussex I’ve been reading up on him. He was an amazing scholar, Freddie, a real-life Doctor Faustus, who believed in the mystical power of numbers and tried to harmonise magic with Christian dogma. He set the stage for later Christian Cabalists like Dr Dee and Francis Bacon.”

“But where did he get his ideas from?”

“From the Greeks, from the academies of Pythagoras and Plato, and later from St Augustine who thought ‘the science of numbers’ could be used to interpret many passages in the Holy Scriptures.”

“Like the
New Testament
references to 666 in the Book of Revelation.”

Sam nodded. “Yeah, the Number of the Beast, the Anti-Christ, but the Benedictine abbot kept well away from this, for a time at least.”

She explained that Trithemius’s intellectual output was in keeping with conventional religious beliefs until, in a letter to a fellow monk in 1499, he boasted about being able to use spirits to communicate over long distances. He called this secret messaging but, in a superstitious age, almost everyone thought it must be a form of black magic.

A century went by before Trithemius’s three volume book
Steganographia
was finally published in Frankfurt, alongside a decryption key for the first two volumes which proved that his discourses on spirits and angels and his tables of astrological formulae were no more than a disguise for ingenious cipher systems. Not that the Catholic Church believed this explanation. They outlawed the book.

“Even then, no one could be sure whether Trithemius was writing about magic or cipher and, in the hundred years during which his manuscripts are missing, he is a kind of bogeyman, a scary figure like Torquemada or Vlad the Impaler, and his work is searched for by both Church and State.”

“How did people know enough to be frightened?” Freddie asked.

“Rumour, gossip, word of mouth, what you call storytelling.”

“Well, this time it will be your turn to tell the story. As far as I’m concerned, he’s just a spectral presence on the information superhighway. Talking of high speed travel, how about another trip to Shoreham? We’ve quite a few loose ends to tie up.”

Sam didn’t seem sure. “I’m busy at the start of next week but I suppose I could manage Wednesday, that’s if you’re free then.”

Freddie began to relax. “Yes, I can do that. We’ll drive down.”

“You’ve got a car?” She sounded surprised.

“Of course I’ve got a car. It’s a Mini F56, nippy and manoeuvrable, perfect for London driving and the open road.”

“Okay, that’s settled.” She let out a deep sigh. “My stomach is rumbling. Perhaps we can get something to eat in that pub over there.”

“Better not,” he said, “unless you like dead animal and chips. Look, my flat is just around the corner in Walton Lane. Let me cook you something.”

“Wow, a man who can cook! Women love that in a guy.”

Freddie felt happier than he’d done all day.

HELL’S ANGELS

Snow was still falling in the Nahe valley. The swirling flakes blurred the massive outline of the Sponheim monastery before settling in the cobbled courtyard to form a thick blanket that muffled even the tolling bell on the eight-sided steeple. A loud banging noise in the cloisters announced the late arrival of Brother Ulrich. He had been last in line for the weekly shave and was still trying to get his scapular over his head when he burst into the scriptorium where his fellow monks had gathered to begin their daily labour.

“For shame, Brother,” the abbot scolded in a clear, piping voice. “Have you forgotten the teachings of St Benedict? The works of Christian scholarship will never reach posterity without the skill of the scribe and his accomplices. All will be lost and the emptiness filled by the roaring of the Devil.”

St Martin’s spiritual leader was a small, intense man with a fringe of wild black hair and blue eyes that could bore into a novice’s soul. Johann of Trittenheim knew that the best way to control a body of celibate men was to fill their waking hours with good thoughts and superstitious fears. There was nothing like the threat of Hell’s fire to frighten these simple souls into submission. By claiming that every work of the Lord was a wound inflicted on Satan, he had turned the dull routine of monastic life into a daily battleground with the forces of evil.

The front line in this war was the scriptorium, a dark and airless limestone cell lit only by candles and the odd shaft of sunlight that penetrated its narrow leaded windows, and it was here that the abbot’s workforce assembled every morning to transcribe his handbook of spiritual exercises,
De triplici regione claustralium
.

The monks formed a production line. One brother cut the pigskin parchment, another polished it, a third ruled lines to guide the scribe whose desk was in a screened off portion of the room. Sitting next to the writer, a fifth monk punctuated the pages before giving them to the abbot for correction. Once satisfied, the abbot handed the proofs to the artists for pagination and illumination – the opening letter of each chapter was to be painted red and embroidered with a miniature picture. Then the leaves were collated and bound with wooden covers for onward dispatch to an already well-stocked library.

Each of these codices was large and laborious to create and there were those in the monastery who privately wondered why their abbot insisted on such a time-consuming activity when the German printing presses had been turning for the past sixty years. Naturally, in an enclosed order, this grumbling reached Trithemius’s ears and he had responded to their complaints in writing. His tract,
De laude scriptorium manualium
, In Praise of Scribes, argued that the very act of copying out the scriptures made the anchorite truly aware of the word of God. Yet the truth was of a more prosaic nature. The paper used in printed books wasn’t nearly as long-lasting as the parchment on which the monks wrote and with all the learning of antiquity miraculously restored to mankind, he wasn’t prepared to risk losing it again because of an inadequate manufacturing process.

Elected to office at the tender age of twenty two, Trithemius had inherited a decaying minor cloister in which the vows of poverty, chastity and obedience were no longer observed. The living quarters were dirty and a potential fire risk, the chapel was falling down, servants stole from the larder, and the avaricious monks sold library books to fund a comfortable lifestyle. To everyone’s surprise, the new abbot turned out to be a single-minded reformer who converted St Martin into a centre of learning. Where once there had been only 48 books, now there were almost two thousand religious works and classical texts.

The abbot was a hard man to pin down. A conservative disciplinarian and yet a radical humanist who, like his great contemporaries Erasmus and Reuchlin, believed in the dignity of man and sought to form an international fraternity of scholars, a republic of letters, to explore the feasibility of a common belief system to embrace every philosophy and religion. These were dangerous ideas to hold in an age when those who disagreed with Mother Church were branded heretics and burned alive. So too was his addiction to the Cabala, the secret teachings imparted to the prophet Moses, and his study of angelology and biblical ciphers alarmed not only his flock but those outside the monastery walls.

In the bucolic wine-growing countryside stories circulated about the abbot being a devil worshipper who could raise the dead. Trithemius had heard these rumours and did nothing to dispel them. Ignorant folk could think what they liked. And that went for his monks too.

After midday prayers the cenobites gathered for their main meal of the day. There was no vow of silence in the Benedictine Order and St Martin’s high arched refectory usually echoed with gossip at dinnertime. But today was different. The chamber was hushed as diners strained to hear what Brother Sigmund was saying on the obedentiaries’ table. The monastery’s oldest inmate had been taken ill in the night and Sigmund felt the abbot should know about it. On entering his cell he had found Trithemius awake, scribbling strange incantations on a piece of parchment which, on seeing his infirmarian, he had tried to hide in his desk.

“It’s what he was writing that worries me,” Brother Sigmund confided in his harsh Saxon accent. “From what I could see, he was conjuring up demons and unclean spirits.”

Brother Anselm spoke up, shaking his head as he did so. “You must be mistaken. Our worthy abbot is a wise and reverent Christian who would have nothing to do with the forces of darkness.”

The eyes in Sigmund’s thin pale face burned with religious fervour. He crossed himself quickly before grabbing the sacristan by his bony wrist. “The trouble with you, Anselm, is that you spend too long at the altar. I tell you the abbot is summoning up infernal beings to take possession of our bodies.”

A young novice’s hand shook and wine soaked into the refectory table. In the mounting hysteria, a servant dropped a tureen of steaming vegetable soup on the rattan matting.

The calm voice of Prior Steffan could be heard above the frightened chatter. “You are making the most damaging of allegations. How do we know you are telling the truth?”

“Because I saw the names he’d written – names like Samael, the fallen angel who seduced Eve in the Garden of Eden before consorting with Lilith, a female demon who strangles new-born babies.”

The claustral prior pressed his hands together church-and-steeple style. “That may be so. I know little of demonology but isn’t Samael the most beautiful of the Archangels who has twelve wings and resides in the Fifth Heaven. Surely this was the Samael our abbot was writing about.”

There was an audible sigh of relief in the room but Sigmund had not finished yet.

“Then how do you account for this?” he said triumphantly, taking a crumpled piece of rag paper out of his tunic pocket. “I found this under the abbot’s desk while he was collecting his Bible.”

“Doesn’t the Lord our God tell us not to steal.” Anselm sounded shocked.

Sigmund nodded. “Sometimes the end justifies the means. Read what the abbot has written. ‘Padiel aporsy mesarpon omeuas peludyn malpreaxo’ – he is invoking an evil spirit called Padiel.”

Anselm gave a hoot of derision. “You are very good at placing us on ash crosses, Infirmarian, but you know little of the spirit world. Padiel is the leader of the angelic host in the fourth celestial region.”

With the exception of Sgmund, whose heavy features twisted into a scowl, the entire room seemed happy to hear this. Their religious leader was pure and unsullied after all.

Had he overheard what was being said about him, the abbot would probably have laughed aloud. Far from being diabolical, the Padiel evocation was no more than an exercise in secret writing in which the enciphered message could be read by selecting every other letter in every other word. Padiel aPoRsY mesarpon oMeUaS peludyn mAlPrEaXo contained the words ‘PRIMUS APEX’ – an ironic joke about the foothills of a new science. The only demon on display here was the inner one that drove him on.

Every evening after Compline the abbot retreated to his cell to work on his new eight-part book of ciphers,
Steganographia
. It was in keeping with his orderly and inventive spirit that he should have found a way to save on candles. A combination of sulphur and alum heated on a copper hotplate, with borax and ethanol added, gave him an eternal flame. As he burned his very own midnight oil, Trithemius never doubted the value of his work. Disguised as a book of angelic magic, these cipher systems would be sent to the syncretic brotherhood and could be employed to protect their correspondence.

In a disjointed world connected only by horse messengers and river freight, where vital military and diplomatic messages were often intercepted, Europe’s secular powers had long since taken to encrypting letters. All he was doing was getting ahead of the game.